What are you Searching for?

New Brunswick’s strategic nearshore value proposition has already attracted some of the world’s top financial and information technology institutions to the province. Opportunities NB (ONB) continues to strengthen that value proposition with a focus on those sectors. ONB has worked hard to establish New Brunswick as the fastest-growing financial centre in Canada, including a focus on financial technology (fintech).

It’s not only about attracting the world’s best companies, it involves building the right ecosystem. Our CyberNB team, for example, has also placed a strong focus on the cybersecurity concerns of financial services.

That combination of priorities, which includes ONB’s unique Workforce Strategy Team, has created an attractive ecosystem for fintech startups like Toronto-based Dream Payments. The company is moving its Development Centre from Russia and Vietnam to Moncton, with senior developers already immigrating to New Brunswick with their families.

ONB spoke with Long Van, the company’s CTO, to learn more.

ONB: Can you first give us an overview of the company?

Long Van: We are a fintech solutions company; our technology enables businesses of all sizes to easily accept payments, go mobile and more efficiently run their business.

Our direct-to-consumer product is the only mobile payment solution that accepts Interac® Debit and is available at retail locations and online. A merchant can purchase our Mobile Point of Sale (MPOS) device in-store, download our free mobile app, register and start accepting debit cards, credit cards, and contactless payments within minutes.

Leading financial institutions and merchant acquirers also use Dream’s Payment-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform to provide mobile point-of-sale (POS) applications, next-generation payment terminals, and value-added services to their business customers. As a Payment Cloud provider, we’re enabling Financial Institutions with the ability to bring mobile-based payment solutions to market much faster. Organizations like Chase Paymentech use the Dream platform today to power their mobile payment acceptance solution. The message we’re sending to financial institutions and merchant acquirers is that we’re here to work with them.

Why New Brunswick for this Centre of Excellence?

We really wanted to bring our offshore operations nearshore to increase functional efficiency. When investigating Atlantic Canada we looked at several potential locations. Ultimately, New Brunswick had the right combination of infrastructure and quality of life we felt would be ideal for existing employees.

New Brunswick made sense from both a cost perspective and an immigration perspective. We have had great support from ONB and the City of Moncton on the latter. ONB really helped guide us through the immigration piece, bringing a great level of transparency to that entire process.

The immigration part of this story is worth highlighting. Tell us about that.

Eight families, from both Russia and Vietnam, have already immigrated to the Moncton region. In total, we are looking at 14 families making the move to New Brunswick and to date the experience has been really smooth. Our Moncton Centre of Excellence will focus on developing payments innovation and cloud-enabled solutions. These are high growth areas, so growing the Moncton team over the near and long-term is a priority for us.

The collaboration of ONB, the City of Moncton, MAGMA, and the educational institutions here has been tremendous. Again, ONB support has been excellent in terms of introducing us to the local network, including financial sector players that can benefit from our products and services.

Our CyberNB team has a focus on financial services; that will surely be of benefit to your team.

Absolutely, we see plenty of opportunities to collaborate with CyberNB. Quantum computing, for example, is going to be detrimental to our existing encryption frameworks. Staying updated on things like that is an imperative. I’ve already had discussions with ONB about getting and staying out in front of that. Quantum computers are not available to everyone; for a startup, they’re not affordable or economical. If there were a way to help get access to laboratories with quantum computers, where we could performance test or stress test our solutions, that would be welcome. Having an organization like CyberNB nearby will be a huge benefit to us no doubt.